We can begin to inquire about authorship at the most macro level, that is, the sprawling vast and open-ended text that inSITE provides for all interpreters, including participants of all walks. A feature of this complex process is that it puts the artist in a very particular acting role. S/he is a content, or better yet, process provider for the directors and curators. I have invoked two metaphors to understand the process. According to the first, the theatrical production, the producers hire directors/scriptwriters, which in the case of inSITE97 and inSITE2000 are the four curators. They provide an open-ended "script" or agenda for the event, which is not to imply that artists simply carry out any preconceived plan. On the contrary, the curators "already know" that artists are "unpredictable" and it is for this very reason that certain artists are selected to produce "process." Indeed, artists like Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Roman de Salvo point out that regardless of the curatorial mission, many artists gladly accept the opportunity to participate in these high-profile programs and then do whatever it is they are most inclined to. That is, recognizing that institutions use artists, the latter must try to stake out a space of possibility or an opportunity for a "line of flight" within those constraints. The "script" or set of program themes is only a point of departure, and the artists do depart. For co-director Krichman, what drives inSITE conceptually, and what he finds "fascinating and amazing is to see how artists can construct and deconstruct space; cause us to look at things in a different way, such as what results from, say, a video montage of flows across the border or from the dialogue between an artist and an engineer at Qualcomm." While inSITE is not a traditional art institution like a museum, it has, like them, particular needs, which artistsí­ projects, following Fraserí­s service model, can provide.

When viewed from the "services" perspective, it becomes obvious that the serendipity of artists getting us to see things in a different way is an institutional need—regarding their publics, their educative mission, their fundraising responsibilities for outreach to nontraditional "communities," their cutting-edge or international status—specific to the context of an institution, which does not simply "just happen" and which must be produced. Krichman and Cuenca have a staff that assists artists at almost every step in the process. As one staff member reported, "we are frustrated about the extent to which artists are asking that we help produce their work. Artists get frustrated by bureaucracy but they are asking staff to help in the production." Often this involves attempting difficult-to-solve problems, such as finding the right service provider for, say, drilling holes in monumental granite cubes to transform them into large die, or even doing the impossible such as getting permissions from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and/or the Border Patrol to open holes in the border fence and the like. When such endeavors do not, predictably, pan out, staff helps out in conceiving alternatives. Staff members also make an enormous personal investment to the projects and the artists, including ferrying them to sites and suppliers, having long discussions with them into the wee hours, and investing the immeasurable labor of love (of art) and the labor of producing process. This investment includes critical work that does not always surface in the exhibition materials like the catalogue and guide. Many of the staff, in fact, have studied art or are interns from curatorial programs. Indeed, some of the information on the day-to-day mediations by staff briefly described here as well as a wealth of artistic/bureaucratic troubleshooting episodes are eloquently captured in Sofia Hernándezí­s Transitio, a semi-fictional chronicle of her stint as an inSITE intern. The staffí­s function as a sounding board for an artistí­s project is a kind of labor that extends beyond wage work and approximates the emotional and nonpublic labor usually associated with unrecognized and uncompensated "womení­s work."

The point of this critique is NOT that inSITE is exploiting community participants or its staff, but rather that the art process is much more complex than the exhibition of work by individual artists. The artistic process is a large-scale collaboration that is concealed from the participants themselves and that, like Wodiczkoí­s event, needs to see the light of day. The point then, is that inSITE is a work in itself. It becomes the very site for examining relations between cultural labor and value, as well as in the value-producing circumstances of bi-nationality and trans-nationality. InSITE should not only conceive of itself as a venue for artistsí­ projects. More than any other biennial or art festival, it has brought together all the different forms of cultural labor, and in doing so, has established a hemispheric processing zone whose organization makes it visible and palpable how the cultural economy functions. But what do we do once we see how it functions? Critique of this venue will not produce the dis-alienating effects believed to ensue from the uncovering of ideological structures and process characteristic of ideology critique. Nor will we get in touch with our phenomenological body or have a limit experience. What inSITE calls for, in my view, is to become a user, a collaborator who intervenes in order to have the labor expended recognized and compensated. We must remember that that cultural labor is not only co-opted or exploited labor, but also given willingly and not on the basis of financial remuneration. If inSITE is to exploit anything, it should be its capacity to make visible and palpable the non-instrumental motives that inhere in the instrumental uses of cultural collaboration.

George Yúdice is Professor of the American Studies Program, and of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He also directs the Privatization of Culture Project for Research on Cultural Policy and the Inter-American Cultural Studies Network, whose purpose is to engage scholars, intellectuals, activists and artists in North-South dialogue on the role of cultural work in furthering citizen participation in aesthetic, political, social, and economic matters. His research interests include cultural policy; globalization and transnational processes; the organization of civil society; the role of intellectuals, artists and activists in national and transnational institutions; comparison of diverse national constructions of race and ethnicity. He is the author of Vicente Huidobro y la motivación del lenguaje poético (Buenos Aires, 1977), Culture and Value: Essays on Latin American Literarature and Culture (forthcoming), The Expediency of Culture<